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Despite the fact that psychoanalysts seem to know a confrontation when they see one, surprisingly few have written about it, and even fewer have tried to define it. As several of the authors in this issue point out, it doesn’t appear in the index to the Standard Edition (Freud, 1974) of Freud’s work, nor in the indexes of many other authors that we associate with the concept.
The term, however, has been used in psychoanalysis in a variety of ways. During the first fifty years of the field, it was a simple descriptive term, as in “the ego is confronted with aspects of the id;” everyone knew what it meant from ordinary speech. At some point, it began to take on a more forceful, aggressive connotation, as a specific intervention with especially difficult patients. Finally, beginning in the early 1950s, under the influence of psychoanalysts who had emigrated from Europe, technical procedures were becoming more precise and confrontation began to be mentioned as one of a series of specific technical maneuvers, culminating in Greenson (1964), who designated it as the first stage in a prescribed sequence of interventions in every standard analysis.
Psychoanalysis has changed markedly in the last four decades, however, with many new points of view entering the mainstream in the United States, and different schools, both here and around the world, beginning to talk to one another, out of which have emerged points of agreement, as well as disagreement. But, except in debates between Kernberg (1975) and others on the treatment of borderline patients, that dialogue has rarely included the topic of confrontation.
The time, then, seems right to ask a series of contemporary psychoanalysts from different analytic points of view to give their perspectives on the topic of confrontation and to illustrate those perspectives with clinical material—and it leads to a series of questions:
Is confrontation still a viable term, or has it been discredited as part of an authoritarian past? Do conte